Nifty new toy in the playpen

Feeling the need to get away from my desk this afternoon, I wandered into TechShop to see what was new the past couple of months.

Well, various things have changed.  The most conspicuous change was the disappearance of the big CNC machining center with the frozen spindle (and, if memory serves, its turning-center counterpart).

The space formerly occupied by the machining center now contained some sort of framework.  Sort of cube-ish.  Vaguely 10-feet-on-a-side-ish.  Could it be...?

Go take a closer look.  Yup.  Things that go up and down and back and forth on rails, with a wire strung between them, and a big spring for tensioning the wire.

It's a humongous CNC hot-wire foam-cutting machine.

Which is kind of a nifty thing to have, I guess, if you ever find yourself wanting to carve large slabs of foam into, say, several-foot-long airfoil shapes in preparation for wrapping carbon-fiber cloth around them.